phoning greetings to birthday boy Pete Cummings he told me how much he had enjoyed, the night before, his young daughter Eva's impromptu tribute of a dance to a Thelonius Monk tune & it reminded me how much that Monk (& jazz generally however "cerebral") is dance music above all, which you don't have to tell kids (or Monk!), which reminded me to of one little version of paradiso I carry around in my head, that of the Lighthouse Cafe's "Sunday Concerts" at Hermosa Beach California in the 50's, which I read about in some sleeve note somewhere, where people could drop by in the afternoon & bring their kids to dig Chet Baker, Jimmy Giuffre, Chet Baker, June Christy &c &c. I just assume some dancing went on is all. The beach right there... Glad to see the place is still thriving, with live music every night!

 

A Poem for Vipers

John Wieners

I sit in Lees. At 11:40 PM with
Jimmy the pusher. He teaches me
Ju Ju. Hot on the table before us
shrimp foo yong, rice and mushroom
chow yuke. Up the street under the wheels
of a strange car is his stash--The ritual.
We make it. And have made it.
For months now together after midnight.
Soon I know the fuzz will
interrupt, will arrest Jimmy and
I shall be placed on probation. The poem
does not lie to us. We lie under
its law, alive in the glamour of this hour
able to enter into the sacred places
of his dark people, who carry secrets
glassed in their eyes and hide words
under the coats of their tongue.



many more, read aloud by the poet, here...

real-life Luchadore Priest--

"I never knew where the next meal was coming from," he explained. "So I became a professional wrestler because I had a cause. If it weren't for my children, there would have been no reason to fight." Father Sergio's identity was eventually leaked when one of his colleagues, Daniel Garcia, the legendary Huracan Ramirez, attended a mass given by the good father and the news of his identity spread. "Luchadores were afraid to fight me, not because of my strength or skill but they were afraid of the fans," recalled the priest in an interview with Micahael Pazt of Slam Wrestling. "They would shout out, 'You can't fight a priest!' and they would throw tomatoes, garbage and even coins at them!"
 

700 free Feature Films like Night of the Living Dead, My Man Godfrey, docs &c. &c....
 

Independent Online Edition > Robert Fisk

"And do the Israelis realise that they are legitimising Hizbollah, that a rag-tag army of guerrillas is winning its spurs against an Israeli army and air force whose targets - if intended - prove them to be war criminals and if unintended suggest that they are a rif-raff little better than the Arab armies they have been fighting, on and off, for more than half a century? Extraordinary precedents are being set in this Lebanon war.

In fact, one of the most profound changes in the region these past three decades has been the growing unwillingness of Arabs to be afraid. Their leaders - our "moderate" pro-Western Arab leaders such as King Abdullah of Jordan and President Mubarak of Egypt - may be afraid. But their peoples are not. And once a people have lost their terror, they cannot be re-injected with fear. Thus Israel's consistent policy of smashing Arabs into submission no longer works. It is a policy whose bankruptcy the Americans are now discovering in Iraq.

And all across the Muslim world, "we" - the West, America, Israel - are fighting not nationalists but Islamists. And watching the martyrdom of Lebanon this week - its slaughtered children in Qana packed into plastic bags until the bags ran out and their corpses had to be wrapped in carpets - a terrible and daunting thought occurs to me, day by day. That there will be another 9/11."

Free Speakers

Free Speakers, originally uploaded by Mongibeddu.

in Maine, from the camera of Ben Friedlander, reminded me guiltily of the old stereo I just gave away, residua of all that emotion adhering to the flaking cones and magnets & then they became an impromptu memorial for Arthur Lee of Love, who died today...

"what is happening
& how have you been?"

the real gem in Sundays all-day Robert Duvall fest on TCM is at 1:00 in the afternoon--John Flynn's ultra-tough 1973 noir The Outfit with Karen Black, Joe Don Baker & Robert Ryan, from the Donald Westlake novel...

 

The Bergen Sound

"If you're after fruitily inventive music that's filling up dancefloors, warming up radiowaves, sounding great in shops, and flooding out of myriad pop telly channels through the night, get yourself over to Bergen, Norway. There you'll find Kings Of Convenience, Annie, Sondre Lerche and Ralph Myerz and the Jack Herren Band. It's a scene that's been putting the cheery Euro-willies up serious old electronica for a while now. But with the second album from local heroes R�yksopp, the 'Bergen Sound' comes of age..."

It really is great, the summer pop album I've been looking for...

 

farewell to Elisabeth Schwarzkopf--

"Legge, later artistic director of EMI records, would sit in a stage box while Schwarzkopf sang, watching for the exact moment when women fumbled in their handbags for handkerchiefs and men tugged them from their breast pockets. He recalled: "We tried for years and once or twice succeeded in achieving Pamina's "Ach, ich f�hl's" so heartbreakingly that there was no applause." Some critics felt that there was element of calculation in this which robbed Schwarzkopf's performances of their spontaneity; but what no one could deny was that over the years her voice became richer, warmer and ever more accurately focussed."

Note: It's worth registering with the Daily Torygraph just for the obits if you're that sort of person: completest, best and drollest in print or on the web, especially good for tinder-dry accounts of the superhuman exploits of old sailors and soldiers with names like "Cuddles" and "Flaps"...today also found that Keith Moon's poor long-suffering ex-wife Kim had passed, and the navigator of my dad's ship "Bellona" on the arctic convoys and D-day...

 

re-watching Michael Mann's 1999 The Insider for the enth time & in a film full of good things big & small surely the standout is Bruce McGill (above) for about 15 seconds, as a Mississippi lawyer, trying to get a deposition into the record over the grinning interference of tobacco hireling Wings Hauser, who gets pushed a bit too far, thunderously turning on his heels and pinning Hauser with a "Would you wipe that smirk off your face" that really does, like one of the assault rifles in "Heat"...